


Midnight Clear

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [23]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sibling Bonding, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:15:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28259832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Spending Christmas stranded in rural Mongolia, running out of food, is just about par for the course for them at this point.
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1232444
Comments: 20
Kudos: 29





	Midnight Clear

There was a wild and severe beauty to this place. Even with icy needles of wind piercing his scarf and bringing tears to his eyes, Ward had to admit that. A sweeping scrubby plain, bronze and white, stretched away from him to distant mountains: not the staggering kind they'd climbed in the Himalayas but low humps of purple and dun, making him think of the backs of the herds of shaggy cattle they had passed on their way out here.

They were in the foothills of mountains here, amid the scattered, stone ruins of a long-abandoned city. Back home, Ward thought, this would be a tourist attraction, with interpretive signs and neat gravel paths and a visitor center and buses. They certainly _had_ been to places like that in Mongolia already; this ancient road they were on had probably once led to Karakorum, the old Mongol capital, now a tourist site where they had walked around temples and looked at old stone lions and fascinating-to-Danny piles of rocks.

But there were ruins here that didn't even have names anymore, collapsing stone wells beside old roads, temples on the horizon that turned out to be nothing but crumbling half-fallen walls when they got there. They had learned of this place not from maps or the Internet, but from talking to locals in the towns they passed through: a long-vanished city whose ruins were associated with griffins and dragons and mythic warriors who carried fire in their hands ... 

Which of course meant they had to come here; it was part of a connect-the-dots trail that had taken them all over the world and probably wasn't done with them yet. Unless, of course, the road ended here, in the mountains of Mongolia where they had been stranded after being let down by a large hunk of immobile iron shaped like a truck, and the con artist who'd sold it to them.

Okay, that was not positive thinking. That was the opposite of positive thinking. Not that Ward's brain had ever cooperated with him in that area.

Positive thoughts, positive thoughts. Hey, he was admiring the view, which was a positive thought, right?

The wind off the steppe was freezing his face. He turned away from the beautifully terrible scenery and back to the task at hand, which was fetching water from a cistern with a few feet of half-frozen water in the bottom of it.

At least, Ward thought, as he trudged toward the cistern, if the truck _had_ to break down in the middle of nowhere—or more accurately, run out of gas, due to the fact that the gas gauge didn't work and the actual tank had a huge dent in it and only held about half what it should—it had done it here, rather than down there on that dry, snowswept plain. Their supplies were going to run out sooner or later, but here they had shelter, and a nearly unlimited supply of water in the city's handful of intact stone cisterns. Ward had been nervous about using it at first, but Danny pointed out that it was rainwater and therefore probably clean enough to drink, and anyway, their water supplies were going to run out soon and did Ward really want to spend all the daylight hours collecting dry, sand-filled snow and wasting their limited firewood melting it?

The cistern was a low stone basin with a waist-high rock wall around it. Maybe a cistern wasn't what it had been before, maybe it was an old grain storage silo with the top fallen in; who knew. But it had water in it now. Ward leaned down and broke the ice at the edge, enough to dip the dented metal bucket they'd found in the back of their broken-down truck. The bucket was heavier when filled than he'd expected, and dragged his hand briefly into the water, soaking his glove. "Fuck," he muttered under his breath. At least he'd done his firewood-collecting earlier, scrounging for brush in the well-picked-over ruins; there was ample sign that the local cattle herders occasionally pastured their herds here. Sadly none of them seemed to be in the neighborhood right now.

He trudged back through sand and small drifts of the dry desert snow to the house where they had set up their camp. It was a small stone building, still intact and surprising warm once they had rigged their tent as a makeshift door covering, though hellishly smoky. ("At least there's enough brush around here that we don't have to burn cattle dung," Danny had said with what Ward thought was unwarranted cheerfulness, before adding, "... yet.")

Ward pushed aside the tent-door and was immediately met with the reek of woodsmoke (expected) along with something that sounded like an unholy combination of Metallica and bluegrass, in what he assumed was Mongolian. Danny looked up from his sleeping bag nest by the fire and thumbed the volume on his phone down.

"Should you really be using what little battery we have left for that?" Ward asked. He set down the bucket just inside the door so he could strip off his wet and, from the feel of it, half-frozen glove.

"It's not like we have cell service here." Danny's voice sounded worse than earlier, a breathy rasp, and he muffled a cough in his fist. 

"We might get somewhere that does, and then we're going to be sorry if we can't call for help because we ran down our batteries playing Mongolian country death metal."

"It's not using that much battery," Danny muttered sulkily, but he turned the phone off. "The band's called Hanggai. They're good. I think I'll see if I can get any CDs when we get back."

Among the various other junk they had acquired along with the truck, Danny had found a cell phone, which he'd managed to power on just long enough to find that it was loaded up with music. He had transferred the storage card to his own phone to listen to, ignoring Ward's horrified lecture—"Do you know nothing about computer security? Do the words 'virus' mean anything to you?"—and had been listening to it off and on, shepherding his phone's battery and now borrowing Ward's phone because he'd run the battery down doing that and taking pictures of rocks with ancient carvings on them to decipher later.

But Ward didn't feel like fighting about it right now, and Danny _had_ turned the phone off. Traveling with Danny had taught him to pick his fights. He stripped out of his cold boots and crouched beside Danny on the end of the sleeping bag, holding out his hands to the fire. 

Danny started coughing again and eventually doubled over in the throes of a coughing fit. Ward got up and got him a cup of water from the bucket. He'd mostly gotten over his uncomfortable feeling about drinking it since they had been doing it for days and neither of them had dysentery yet. 

Mostly.

"I don't know if it's worse for you being in here in all this damn smoke or being out there where it's forty below zero."

"Stop giving me that look," Danny wheezed, pressing a hand to his side. "I'm fine."

"We're stranded in Mongolia and you've got pneumonia."

"I do not," Danny protested faintly. "It's a—cold, that's all—"

Ward shoved the cup into his hands.

"Stop trying to talk, you'll start coughing again. Look, you've been running a fever for days, you have no energy, and I can see how much it hurts when you cough. If it's not pneumonia, it's still not _good."_

Danny glared at him over the rim of the cup with reddened eyes, but didn't say anything, which prevented Ward from having to threaten to gag him.

Instead Ward laid his gloves by the fire to dry, and then noticed that the firewood pile was nowhere near as large as it should be. He'd spent the middle part of the day collecting wood, dropping it off at the door and leaving it to Danny to bring in. Now he glanced up. And around.

"Danny, why is our firewood hanging from the ceiling?" And the walls. And around the door. It was mostly branches from the scrubby evergreens growing around the old ruins.

"Decorations?" Danny said hoarsely, and took another sip from the cup.

"For?"

"Christmas?"

"Shit." He hadn't really been paying attention to the passage of time, other than 'too much of it'. "Are you kidding me? Is it Christmas already? It can't be."

"Christmas Eve." Danny stifled another cough, grimacing. "Double-checked the date on your phone. I know, it doesn't seem like we've been here nearly that long, does it?"

"You know," Ward said, "this is one of those situations where I genuinely can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or just obtuse."

"It was sarcasm, Ward."

"So you're decorating the Cratchit hovel with brush," Ward said, looking up at the scruffy branches above the door. No wonder Danny was coughing. He was supposed to be _resting_ and instead he'd been doing this. The Meachums were never a Christmas-celebrating sort of family, and right now Ward wished the Rands hadn't been, either.

"I know they're not pine, but they're evergreen, right?" Danny frowned at the spiny branches. "Kinda."

"So what you're saying is, you used up all our firewood, and we need more."

Danny looked up at the scraggly garlands, then at Ward. "Yeah," he said, and heaved himself up to his knees. "I'll just go and—whoa—"

Ward caught him before he fell into the fire. "Sit. _Down."_

"Head rush," Danny muttered, resting his head in his hands. "Give me a minute."

"Yeah." Ward thought about pulling down the garlands and burning them, and the likely look on Danny's face if he did that. Then he got up. "I'm gonna borrow your gloves. Mine got wet."

"Ward, you don't have to—listen, there's enough, okay? We can make it through tonight. You don't have to go back out there."

"Unless another of those windstorms moves in. Where are your gloves?"

"I'm coming," Danny declared, struggling to his feet, holding onto the wall. "I've got spare gloves in my pack."

"You can barely stand up."

"You said yourself the fresh air will be better for me."

Ward was familiar from long experience with the utter uselessness of trying to talk Danny out of anything, so he just threw his hands in the air. "Fine. Give me your extra gloves."

They pushed out past the tent into the sharp, clear air. The sun was gone behind the mountains and evening had begun to bleed into the clear dome of the sky, a spectrum of oddly muted color from indigo on the eastern horizon, through various shades of blue and green, to deep gold tinted with pink in the west. It looked like it ought, by all rights, to be dark soon. Ward had learned, however, how long the twilight could last here. This was no quick tropical dusk. They would have light for hours yet, a clear blue twilight unlike anything he'd experienced elsewhere.

Still, there were, in theory, snow leopards and other predators around. Ward had been reassured by multiple people back in Ulaanbaatar that the snow leopards rarely came down from the mountains and bothered anyone, but he figured a) the fact that they'd even thought to say that was probably a bad sign (people rarely warned you about the general lack of wolves and bears in Manhattan), and b) traveling in Danny's company made it at least 50% more likely.

... Danny. Damn it. Ward glanced at him. Danny was bundled in scarves up to his eyes, with an occasional cough coming from underneath the scarf layers. He noticed Ward looking at him, and rolled his eyes above the scarf.

"I'm _fine._ Where have you been getting the wood from?"

"Up here," Ward said. "It's going to involve climbing a little."

They mounted the hillside, picking their way between the rocks. The wind hit them in sharp gusts, lifting little dust-devils of snow that was mixed with sand and virtually indistinguishable from it in texture. Ward still couldn't get used to the snow here. You sometimes got icy, crumbly snow back in New York, an ice-crystal sort of texture, but the snow here was like salt crystals, so un-snowlike that he sometimes had to pick it up and melt it on his palm to convince himself that it was actually snow.

He now regretted that he knew exactly what people were talking about when they mentioned the difference between dry and wet cold. This kind of cold didn't turn your hands to ice and freeze your ears, the way a sharp wind keening down the canyons of the city could do in December. It was a more insidious kind of cold, sucking the moisture and heat out of your body. By now they'd spent enough time in high mountain country enough that he was starting to get used to it, or at least learn ways to cope with it, like stocking up on hand lotion and lip balm, but his lips and fingertips were still dry enough to crack and bleed, not to mention scratched up from the thorny brush snagging and piercing his gloves. 

So. Christmas was happening. Apparently. He'd had all kinds of plans—he might not have grown up with Christmas as much more than a public-relations sort of holiday, and even Joy had stopped celebrating it after Dad died beyond a perfunctory Christmas dinner with Ward and the usual round of annual PR events, but what better time to _do better?_ He had meant to send something to Joy, or at least call her; he was going to call Bethany, or text her, or open a full-ride college savings account for the daughter he hadn't actually met yet ...

And he'd changed his mind fifty times, bouncing back and forth between "too much" and "not enough" and "creepy stalker" ...

And now here he was, trapped with no cell service at the ass end of nowhere, and their truck had run out of gas and Danny had pneumonia and was probably going to die, and Ward was going to end up living as a hermit in Mongolia for the rest of his life, however long that turned out to be before the snow leopards got him—

"Hey, Ward," Danny said, and Ward looked up from snapping off pieces of prickly brush and wishing he was anywhere other than here. "Look at that."

Ward turned around. He hadn't really noticed the changing quality of the light around them, but everything was pink now: the ground, the snow, the sky. There wasn't a cloud anywhere in sight, the sky featureless as an inverted porcelain bowl. A few stars were beginning to emerge in the east, where pink went to dark violet in a fuzzy arc, and it occurred to Ward that he was seeing the shadow of the earth itself on the sky.

He couldn't help wondering how you'd capture that in paint, if you even could. 

"I just thought you should see that," Danny said, smothering a cough. The pink was already starting to bleed out of the sky, the odd color fading out of the world around them. "It's really something, huh? I used to love the sunsets in K'un-Lun. It was like that, a lot. Colors I don't even have names for."

"Ecru," Ward said, and Danny started to laugh and stifled another cough. "Muted eggshell. Kung fu blue."

"Is Rand in the business of naming paint chips?"

"Maybe we are now," Ward said. "You can have your own line. Iron Fist orange."

Danny laughed to himself and reached for another clump of brush. He did actually seem to be doing okay out here. Maybe Ward had been going overboard with the protectiveness, trying to keep him from exerting himself. It was just that the consequences of Danny actually getting a full-blown case of pneumonia out here were ... not really something Ward wanted to think about.

He scrambled higher on the hillside. Dusk was falling steadily around them, a deepening blue, draining all other color from the world. They needed to finish up here and get back down to the hut, but he'd seen something, and he wanted a closer look at it.

"Ward?" Danny called, now out of sight among the rocks.

"Stay down there," Ward called back. "I'll be down in a minute."

 _And let's just hope I don't meet any snow leopards up here._ He was armed, at the moment, with nothing except the small hatchet he'd been using to cut wood.

The thing he'd seen, silhouetted against the sky, turned out to be a lot less impressive up close, a thorny gnarled bush like all the other bushes around here, but a little more erect with less of a tendency to sprawl. It was about waist high. Ward dropped his armload of firewood and tried to pull it out of the ground, then used the hatchet on its roots. He felt vaguely guilty about taking the whole plant rather than just a few branches, but based on the total denuding of plant life around the ruins, the next time a herder came through it was probably going to end up in someone else's campfire anyway.

He finally got it free, falling onto one knee and bruising his leg to go with the brand-new bloodstains on the gloves where he'd acquired some new thorns. Ward sighed and gathered up his wood, then struggled to his feet with the bush dangling from one hand.

 _"There_ you are," Danny said when Ward clambered back down to him. "I think we'd better get back to the house before it gets completely dark. What've you got there?"

Ward looked down self-consciously at the bush clamped in his hand and very nearly just ... lied. It was firewood. It would burn perfectly well. And it wouldn't pass muster in even the most clichéd of holiday specials.

"Christmas tree," he said, and Danny lit up like a sunrise.

*

Back in the hut, they unloaded their firewood and argued over how to set up the tree, and especially how to keep it upright. Piling rocks around its base didn't really do the job. It was top-heavy, and kept finding different ways to fall over, nearly falling into the fire a couple of times. Ward had nightmarish visions of a festive Christmas hut fire, driving them out into the bitterly cold wilderness to die of exposure.

Eventually they propped it against the wall of the hut and tied it with pieces of twine, adding more strands as it tried to tip over in new directions, until it looked like it had been strung up in a spider's web.

Danny's energy flagged visibly during the tree setup. He looked markedly worse for having been outside; his fever was clearly back, his eyes glassy, and his cough had a rattle in it that Ward didn't like. 

"Aspirin," Ward ordered, shoving the bottle at him. 

"Mother hen," Danny muttered, but he shook a single aspirin out into his palm, and held the bottle upside down. "I hope this isn't the only bottle."

"There are some sample packages in the first-aid kit, I'm pretty sure."

Danny nodded and swallowed the aspirin with the cup of water that Ward gave him.

They were running out of almost everything. Sooner or later they were going to have to make a hard decision. It was, Danny had estimated, going to take anywhere between two and five days to walk back to civilization, depending on conditions and how far they'd actually driven since neither the truck's speedometer nor odometer worked either. They could do it. At least Ward could. But Danny's strength for a walk like that was an open question mark right now. And Ward had zero confidence in his own ability to navigate across that stretch of treeless plain, no matter how many times Danny tried to point out that he could navigate by the mountains. All the mountains looked alike to him. There were traces of an old road, but Ward hadn't been able to see it most of the time; for all he knew Danny had been driving toward the mountains by sheer dead reckoning. And the truck's tracks were long since erased by the wind. 

Anyway, he loathed the idea of leaving Danny alone in a ruined city, with next to no food, no backup if anything went wrong, sick and getting sicker ...

"Stop stressing, Ward," Danny said. He tapped the aspirin bottle against his hand. "You think we could make Christmas ornaments out of this?"

*

The bottle, maybe not so much, but they did have a number of empty foil packets that had contained camp food. They lay in their sleeping bags by the fire to stay warm and conserve fuel while they cut and folded little tin stars. At least Ward was folding stars. Danny made cranes and tigers and boats.

"Show-off."

"You still remember how to make a boat, right? I showed you boats."

"Yes, I can make a boat."

He worked on a boat. Danny reached out to gently correct his folds every once in awhile. It was very quiet and almost cozy, lying here wrapped up in sleeping bags with the snapping of the fire and Danny's occasional, quiet coughs. Ward tried to convince himself that Danny wasn't coughing as much as he had been. Maybe he was getting better, and soon they could hike out together.

"It'll be Christmas Eve in New York now too," Danny said in a quiet, dreamy voice, neatly folding the edges of a four-legged creature of some kind. "They're, what, twelve hours behind us, something like that? Colleen might be up by now, depending on what time of the morning it is." He folded a tail, and set the creature down beside a little row of cranes and boats and flowers. "I wonder if she'll get worried if I don't call."

"She _should_ be worried," Ward said, trying not to think about the fact that neither Joy nor Bethany would be worried if _he_ didn't call; they'd probably be relieved. "Calling out the cavalry is exactly what we want her to do."

"Maybe she will," Danny said hopefully. "Colleen's smart." He sounded wistful.

Okay, Ward recognized the signs of a downward Colleen-missing spiral. "You know what? We need to eat, and we've still got a pretty decent amount of food. Why don't we forget about rationing for one night and just eat whatever we want. Christmas dinner."

Danny perked up at that. They'd been trying to save food, keeping themselves down to two light meals a day, and between Danny's illness and his generally fast metabolism, it was hitting him hard; Ward didn't think it was his imagination that Danny had noticeably lost weight. 

"I've still got a chocolate bar," Danny said.

"Holdout," Ward said, and Danny grinned. "I might still have some dried fruit, too. It's not filet mignon, but I'll take it."

The majority of their remaining food supplies were freeze-dried soup and stale pilot bread, but Ward mixed up a decadent _three_ packets and set it to boil it over the fire. They munched on trail mix and two halves of Danny's slightly squashed Snickers bar while they decorated the tree. Cut-out stars and folded animals balanced precariously on the branches, with the leftover scraps for tinsel. Ward contributed a scarf for a garland; scraps and threads from some of their more tattered clothing made bows. 

"It looks like we fished it out of the city dump," Ward said, sitting back on his heels to look at it.

"It's a good tree," Danny protested. "How much would you hate me turning on your phone to take a picture of it?" He was already fumbling with the phone anyway, so Ward rolled his eyes and endured having a picture taken of him too, and then both of them with the tree, before the phone battery died completely.

"Oops," Danny said, fruitlessly trying to turn it back on.

As easy as it would be to blame Danny ... "Not your fault. There wasn't much charge on it to begin with. We might be able to charge the phones off the car battery if we bring it in and warm it up. And you know what?" He put the phone aside. "Forget it. Eat your Christmas Eve dinner and let's enjoy the stupid tree."

*

Christmas last year had been a careful and tentative thing. Danny had had his own thing going on with Colleen and his New York friends, and as for Ward, he and Danny were still tiptoeing around each other, neither quite sure where they stood. There had been warmth, true. They had enjoyed themselves, in a cautious way. But it was a careful warmth, both of them knowing that what they had was fragile and could shatter at a single wrong word. 

It was nothing like this—lying in their sleeping bags scraping the bottom of their tin cups of soup, while the firelight glittered on the tree. From a distance, half in the dark, it looked a little better. The dangling bits of tinfoil caught the light and reflected it back onto the stone walls, dancing like fireflies.

Danny poked Ward's leg with his sock-clad foot. "So, hey, it's Christmas Eve, right? Do you want to open your present now or tomorrow?"

Ward stared at him and carefully set his scraped-clean soup cup aside.

"Are you absolutely fucking _kidding_ me, Daniel Thomas Rand. Where in the hell did you get a Christmas present in the ass end of rural Mongolia?"

"I improvised," Danny said. His eyes were bright with more than the fever, lit up with delight. 

"I may as well open it now, because I'm afraid to imagine what it is and I want to know how guilty I'm going to need to feel for not giving you anything."

"Shut your eyes," Danny said, so Ward did, and got to listen to the sound of stifled coughing and rummaging. "Okay, hold out your hands."

Something soft landed in his palms. He squeezed it, and opened his eyes.

"Isn't this the Harry Potter scarf Colleen gave you?"

"It is _not_ a Harry Potter scarf, it just happens to have some of the same colors, and that's just the wrapping, anyway. Open it."

Whatever was inside didn't seem to be taking up much more room than the scarf. It just felt like a wad of fabric. Ward unrolled the scarf and prepared himself for whatever stupidly thoughtful, or possibly just stupid, item of sibling-ly affection that was probably going to make him feel guilty for the next _week_ about—um—

"Danny ... is this your socks?"

"Excuse _you,"_ Danny said, "it's my _last dry pair_ of socks. Dry and clean and not dried over a smoky campfire, thank you very much. These socks were washed in a laundromat back in Ulaanbaatar. This is a sacrifice, Ward. I hope you appreciate it."

He said all this through a grin, and Ward laughed and shook his head and rolled up the socks. Given the conditions they were living under, it actually _was_ a sacrifice, and a very thoughtful gift besides. It was also completely ridiculous. _This utter idiot._

"I want the scarf back, by the way," Danny added.

"I figured." Ward tossed it to him. "I have something for you too, come to think of it."

"I can't wait," Danny said, and closed his eyes and held out his hands.

Ward dragged his pack over to the fire. He'd taken up drawing again since coming overseas with Danny, but he hadn't stuck at it with any particular diligence. Part of the problem was that he just wasn't _good_ at it. He knew the only way to get better was to keep doing it— _like people, like family_ —but the lines kept coming out wrong and all he could think was that Harold was right, after all. He also kept losing sketchbooks because they kept losing their luggage, in various ways.

But the current sketchbook had a few drawings in it, and Danny had particularly seemed to like one of a stray cat sleeping on a wall in Ulaanbaatar. He'd watched Ward draw it, quietly offering suggestions and making happy noises, and Ward had shaded it with the colored pencils Danny had given him for his birthday. It still wasn't ... well ... _art._ Not good art. But Danny had liked it.

Ward glanced over at Danny, sitting lotus-style on the sleeping bag, hands resting open and palm-up in his lap like a Buddha statue waiting for an offering. And he just had to grin, because ... how in the hell had they _gotten_ here, from where they'd started out? Even if "here" was running out of food in rural Mongolia ...

He'd been in worse places than this. Much worse.

It felt as if there ought to be something he should write on the drawing, some kind of personalization, a thanks or something, but on the other hand, unwarranted optimism aside, he wasn't precisely sure if he was quite ready to _thank_ Danny for getting him stranded in the middle of nowhere. Instead he just signed and dated it, scribbled a quick _Merry Christmas_ , and placed it in Danny's hands.

Danny opened his eyes. He started to grin like he was expecting a joke, and then his eyes went wide and he turned the drawing toward the firelight, holding it carefully by the edges. "Ward," he said, his voice quiet. "This is—Ward. Thank you."

Ward hadn't been prepared for _that_ kind of reaction. He went with a noncommittal grunt.

"I gave you _socks,"_ Danny said.

"And it'll all probably be lost the next time we fall in a river or goats eat our luggage. Want to hang up your new Meachum original 'til you can get it framed?"

Danny nodded wordlessly, and Ward took it from him and stuck it up on the wall near the Christmas bush with some pieces of packing tape.

Danny wrapped his sleeping bag around himself and lay with his head pillowed on his arm, looking up at the drawing and the tree. "You know what, Ward? This is a pretty good Christmas."

"Are you _joking?_ This is a terrible Christmas. We're stuck in Mongolia, everyone we know probably thinks we're dead, and you have pneumonia."

"No I don't," Danny said automatically, stifling a cough that erupted into a full-blown coughing fit. When he managed to emerge from it, he said hoarsely, "Okay, you're right, it's maybe not the best Christmas in certain ways. But," he added, with a gentle grin, "the company's good."

Ward's throat felt thick. "Yeah. I guess it is."

He wrapped up in his sleeping bag, and pulled out their dog-eared deck of cards. They made it through one hand of Go Fish before Danny fell asleep, laying his head down on his arm between one deal and the next and just ... drifting off.

Ward put some more wood on the fire, and curled into his sleeping bag, turned so he could see the tree, such as it was.

It really wasn't much of a Christmas. But it was better than most of his past Christmases. And wasn't _that_ a hell of a statement on his life.

Or maybe it just meant things were getting better.

See? Positive thinking. He could do it. Really.

He wished he could text Joy. Call her. He wasn't even really sure what he could say. It would have just been ... nice, to hear his sister's voice down at the other end of the line. He had never been a holiday person, and the Meachums weren't a holiday family, but Joy had always been there for him, at least until he chased her away, and he really missed that.

"Merry Christmas, little sister," he whispered to the firelit dark. He turned to look at the tufts of blond hair escaping from the sleeping-bag-wrapped bundle next to his—occasionally jerking with a sleep-cough—and reached out to give Danny's hair a light ruffle. "Merry Christmas, little brother."

*

He woke to the fire nearly out, gray daylight streaming through a crack in the tent door covering, and the sound of a lot of large somethings stomping around outside the hut. Danny was sitting up, looking tousled and alarmed, trying to stifle a cough.

"Stay there!" Ward whispered at him. He struggled out of his sleeping bag and reached for his boots.

The sun was barely up, the air like knives. And there were cattle in the snow-covered ruins of the ancient city, dozens of them, shaggy cattle with stubby horns and coats in all shades from white to brown to dusty near-black.

A rider came up between the cows, a woman on a small horse with her cheeks pink from cold and her jet-black hair escaping from a knitted cap. "Hello!" she called, in English. "Are you the Americans?"

"Who's asking?" Ward said, aware of Danny slipping out of the tent door covering and bumping into him from behind.

"My brother sold you a truck," the woman said, looking down at them.

"Ah," Ward said. "Yes. Yes, he did in fact do that."

*

Her name was Uranchimeg, and she lived in Ulaanbaatar, where she had gone to school and now worked as a journalist and TV producer. But she came back a few times a year to visit her family, some of whom were settled in the towns along the base of the mountains, and some of whom still traveled the steppes and lived in gers—Mongolian yurts—as generations before them had done. She grew up that way as a girl, she explained as they made their slow, jouncing, cattle-cluttered way back toward the town. Having heard about her brother selling one of his notoriously unreliable used cars to a couple of tourists, she figured she'd swing out by the ruins with the herd and a half-dozen relatives as they made their slow way around the cattle-grazing grounds, just to make sure everything was okay.

"It sounds like an amazing way to live," Danny said, because of course Danny would think traveling around the back end of nowhere with a herd of cattle sounded like a great way to spend your time.

"I want to make movies about it," Uranchimeg said, riding alongside the wagon where Danny was wrapped up in a mass of blankets. Ward, being healthier, had gotten to ride a horse; hooray. "And I don't mean documentaries. Those are a dime a dozen. But there really are not a lot of home-grown dramas and movies in this country. We _love_ our TV, but locally, it's mostly reality TV and talk shows. We import most of our TV dramas and movies from outside, from America and Russia. You know what I really want to do?" She rode closer to the wagon. "I would like to make Westerns. Like, you know, the American kind? Clint Eastwood? But our stories, our people."

Danny sat up in the wagon. His eyes sparkled. "That would be _amazing._ All this scenery—"

"I know, right?"

They parted ways with the herd about a half-day's ride from town, with Uranchimeg escorting them on into town so they didn't get lost—probably having concluded by now that they were completely useless at surviving on their own, which Ward really couldn't argue with. Though, to be fair, Danny was looking much better after a couple of days of being fussed over by Uranchimeg's aunts, and Ward was starting to get the hang of riding on his stubborn little horse, which (to the vast amusement of Uranchimeg's family) had been guiding Ward much more than the other way around. Also, apparently Rand Industries was going to be underwriting Uranchimeg in starting her own movie production company and filming an action-adventure movie in the hills. Because sure, that was a thing they were doing now. But it wasn't like they didn't owe her their literal lives, so Danny was right that it was just about the least they could do. Also, Ward liked her and the feeling seemed to be weirdly mutual. Or at least she liked Danny and the bonhomie appeared to spill over onto Ward.

It didn't occur to Ward until they were already settled in and enjoying the hospitality of Uranchimeg and her brother the shady used-car salesman that they probably had cell reception here, and it wasn't until later that evening that he was able to plug in his phone and discover, to his complete surprise, a text from Joy.

"Wow," Danny said, flopped on the bed on the opposite side of the tiny room they were sharing in the back of Uranchimeg's brother's place. "Twelve texts and three voicemails from Colleen. I really hope she hasn't called out the cavalry. I mean, the other cavalry, given that we were rescued by actual cavalry, sort of."

"Nice to know we have reliable backup," Ward said absently, sitting on a rug on the floor and staring at the screen.

Joy's text wasn't much. _Hi. Merry Christmas. Say hi to Danny for me._ She didn't say _I love you._ She didn't say _Call me._

But ... it was more than he'd had from her in almost two years. It was Joy, reaching a hand back.

"You okay over there?" Danny asked, turning away from the glow of his phone's screen.

"Fine," Ward said, and he texted her back the picture of their little Charlie Brown tree.

"Ward," Danny said suddenly. He sat up. "Ward. _Shit."_

"What, what?" His alarm made Ward sit up straighter too, twisting around to look at him.

"I didn't get your picture off the wall." Danny looked absolutely stricken, like he'd forgotten some sort of priceless artifact instead of a colored pencil drawing that Ward had whipped off in twenty minutes because he was bored. "I can't believe I forgot it. I have to go back for it."

"Are you serious? No. No going back. Jeez. If you want pictures, I can make you more pictures."

"But you gave me that one," Danny said, and there was the particular determined look on his face that gave Ward horrifying visions of Danny powering through pneumonia and dragging himself 200 miles into the Mongolian wilderness, because Danny had never learned the meaning of the word "no."

And somewhere under that, something fragile and happy was trying to get out, because Danny would do that just to get a picture Ward had given him.

"I'll draw you another picture," he said desperately, "a picture of whatever you want. You want a picture of Colleen?" That was Danny's weak spot, his Achilles' heel, and Ward wasn't above using it. "I can make you one. That's the nice thing about being an artist, Danny; you can draw anything again."

Danny looked at him for a minute, and Ward was just about to ask what he was staring at, when Danny said, "That's the first time you've ever called yourself an artist. I mean, you _are_ , and I know you are, but—"

Ward rolled over and put his pillow over his face. "Shut up."

Later he drew the view from their window, and Danny made the kind of enthusiastic noises that would have seemed insincere coming from anyone else. And then Danny napped, and Ward sat with a leg tucked under him on the opposite bed, and drew Danny sleeping—the tangle of curls, the soft pout of his mouth. Danny sleeping, just sleeping, not anything worse than that. Ward tried to animate him in the drawing, to put _movement_ into the curve of Danny's hand clutching the blanket, the slight scrunch of his face. Even asleep, there was something alive and moving about Danny.

He was never going to show Danny this one. Not even under torture. This was just for him. He quietly smoothed the page, then flipped to a new one, and started drawing the embroidered blanket, coloring it quietly, sinking into the relaxing rhythm of it.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually wrote about 90% of this last year (this is the counterpart to what's going on with Colleen and Joy back in New York in [Silver in the City](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21943345)) and then never finished it for whatever reason. Merry Christmas! By the way, if you want to check out the Mongolian country metal band Hanggai, [here is an example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfA0Hd_Q7YU) They're great.


End file.
